This robots.txt file generator is super-useful. I came this close to writing one of these myself back when I wrote Help the Googlebot understand your web site but I never got around to it.
The GeoBytes IP address locator is pretty good at telling you exactly where, geographically, your IP is originating from.
I published a detailed tutorial on how to set up Apache web server on a Windows PC at Lifehacker today. It’s pretty basic httpd.conf editing and .htaccess/.htpasswd authentication setup stuff. I’ve been running Apache at home for years now, using it for dev sites and to share music and other files.
What was interesting is that when I started writing the piece I saved all my config files and uninstalled Apache, so I could go through all the steps of installation again and get screengrabs for the writeup. And when I tried, the installation would fail, telling me another service was running on port 80. I thought was going nuts - Apache had been removed, and IIS wasn’t running, my firewalls were all off… then I found a board post that explained how to troubleshoot:
A common during-installation error with Apache reads, “Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted. : make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80 no listening sockets available, shutting down. Unable to open logs.” This means that some other server program (like Skype) is interfering with Apache. To figure out what program it is, open a command prompt and type:
netstat -a -o
Find the PID (Process ID) of the program running on your local machine on port 80 (or http.) Then open the Windows Task Manager (Cntl-Alt-Del). In the View menu, choose Select Columns, and check off PID. Then match the PID to the running process to find out what server program is running, and stop the program. Then retry the Apache installation.
Anyway, it was Skype that was running an http server on port 80, blocking my Apache (re)install. Skype! WTF?
Programmer Dean Allen’s free PHP/MySQL app, Refer, displays live real-time referring URLs to your web site.
Of course, one could just watch one’s site logs to get an idea of who’s clicking in from where. But Refer filters out certain types of files (CSS, JS, etc), referers from your own domain, and can exclude certain directories, too. (Like, I don’t want to see any referers generated while I’m working on a post in WordPress.)
I’ve used Refer for several months now on my other site, and besides occassional referer spam problems, it’s a fantastic way to see immediately if your site is getting a whole lot of traffic from fresh links.
The downside of Refer is that it requires a database insert on EVERY request for pages for which you want referers recorded. This can slow things down considerably, and perhaps give your conservative performance-concerned sysadmin indigestion. Refer uses this neat .htaccess line which automatically adds the PHP script to the end of each page for processing:
php_value auto_prepend_file /www/ginatrapani/refer/refer.php
Not sure how long I’ll keep this unpassworded, but here’s Spun’s installation of Refer so you can check out how it works yourself..
Every time I have to publish a clickable email address on a web page I wind up Googling Javascript tools that obscure the mailto: link and telltale user@example.com format so that spam bots can’t easily pick up the address and tsunami the user with junk.
There are plenty of tools out there, but none that do all that I wanted: namely, encode the ‘mailto’ bit and display a live preview of the link. So I’ve gone ahead and thrown one together of my own.
Go ahead and give it a whirl, it’s got exciting iframe cross-scripting going on for the preview. *
* For now it’s Firefox-only while I work out the IE and Safari compatibility issues. Tested and works now on Internet Explorer 6 with SP 2 on Windows, Safari on Panther and Firefox Windows and Mac.
The makers of one of my favorite markup/text/code editors on Windows, HTML Kit, have made a web service available which creates favicons out of images.
Favicons are the small images just before the URL in the address bar of many web browsers.* The images are in the .ico file format, so this web service takes any graphic (like a jpg or gif), resizes it and converts it to the .ico format which includes both a 16×16 and a 32×32 pixel version embedded within it.
It’s a tough challenge finding an image that is recognizable at that size, but totally worth it for the visual branding it brings to your site on readers’ and users’ tab bars and bookmark lists.
Once you’ve created an unzipped your favicon.ico to the web server, include the following inside your pages <head> tag to activate the icon:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/path/to/your/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
* Firefox’s support is probably the best, displaying favicon’s on bookmarks, tabs and in the address bar. Internet Explorer’s support for favicons is pretty much nonexistent.
WebMonkey’s published a helpful how-to on my favorite free text editor for Mac OS X, TextWrangler. Even though I’ve been using TextWrangler for some time now, some things mentioned in this article were still news to me:
What TextWrangler delivers isn’t just less with more, it’s less with everything. The interface — menus, toolbars, command keys, document panes, et cetera — is customizable eight ways from Sunday. The language-sensitive syntax highlighting is a gift from heaven, and the integrated scripting (Unix, Apple Script, and so on) is powerful enough to be, quite frankly, way beyond my daily needs. Oh, and SFTP. And regular expression searches, even PCRE. And spell-check that actually ignores code!
I don’t know how I did any development before installing Chris Pederick’s Web Developer Toolbar in Firefox, it does so much. The live as-you-type CSS editing is what I use the most for tweaking design, but code validation, the quick View Source button, toggling images on and off and viewing form information and div class names are also super-helpful.
CSS guru Eric Meyer’s Color Blender tool takes two colors and a number of midpoints and returns all the shades in between. I used the Color Blender to calculate the blues in this site’s design. Neat, helpful Javascript widget for the color-dumb.